commit the
offence and the difficulty of discovery, enacted a certain set of presumptions,
which, in the absence of direct proof, the jury were directed to receive as
evidence of the crime having actually been committed. The circumstances selected
for this purpose were, that the woman should have concealed her situation during
the whole period of pregnancy; that she should not have called for help at her
delivery; and that, combined with these grounds of suspicion, the child should
be either found dead or be altogether missing. Many persons suffered death
during the last century under this severe act. But during the author's memory a
more lenient course was followed, and the female accused under the act, and
conscious of no competent defence, usually lodged a petition to the Court of
Justiciary, denying, for form's sake, the tenor of the indictment, but stating,
that as her good name had been destroyed by the charge, she was willing to
submit to sentence of banishment, to which the crown counsel usually consented.
This lenity in practice, and the comparative infrequency of the crime since the
doom of public ecclesiastical penance has been generally dispensed with, have
led to the abolition of the Statute of William and Mary, which is now replaced
by another, imposing banishment in those circumstances in which the crime was
formerly capital. This alteration took place in 1803.
 
28 A Scottish form of procedure, answering, in some respects, to the English
Habeas Corpus.
 
29 The journal of Graves, a Bow Street officer, despatched to Holland to obtain
the surrender of the unfortunate William Brodie, bears a reflection on the
ladies somewhat like that put in the mouth of the police-officer Sharpitlaw. It
had been found difficult to identify the unhappy criminal; and when a Scotch
gentleman of respectability had seemed disposed to give evidence on the point
required, his son-in-law, a clergyman in Amsterdam, and his daughter, were
suspected by Graves to have used arguments with the witness to dissuade him from
giving his testimony. On which subject the journal of the Bow Street officer
proceeds thus: -
»Saw then a manifest reluctance in Mr. --, and had no doubt the daughter and
parson would endeavour to persuade him to decline troubling himself in the
matter, but judged he could not go back from what he had said to Mr. Rich. -
NOTA BENE. No mischief but a woman or a priest in it - here both.«
 
30 The magistrates were closely interrogated before the House of Peers,
concerning the particulars of the Porteous Mob, and the patois in which these
functionaries made